NATS-Server is a High-Performance server for NATS.io, a cloud and edge native messaging system. The WebSockets handling of NATS messages handles compressed messages via the WebSockets negotiated compression. Prior to versions 2.11.2 and 2.12.3, the implementation bound the memory size of a NATS message but did not independently bound the memory consumption of the memory stream when constructing a NATS message which might then fail validation for size reasons. An attacker can use a compression bomb to cause excessive memory consumption, often resulting in the operating system terminating the server process. The use of compression is negotiated before authentication, so this does not require valid NATS credentials to exploit. The fix, present in versions 2.11.2 and 2.12.3, was to bounds the decompression to fail once the message was too large, instead of continuing on. The vulnerability only affects deployments which use WebSockets and which expose the network port to untrusted end-points.

Project Subscriptions

No data.

Advisories
Source ID Title
Github GHSA Github GHSA GHSA-qrvq-68c2-7grw nats-server websockets are vulnerable to pre-auth memory DoS
Fixes

Solution

No solution given by the vendor.


Workaround

No workaround given by the vendor.

History

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 16:30:00 +0000

Type Values Removed Values Added
Description NATS-Server is a High-Performance server for NATS.io, a cloud and edge native messaging system. The WebSockets handling of NATS messages handles compressed messages via the WebSockets negotiated compression. Prior to versions 2.11.2 and 2.12.3, the implementation bound the memory size of a NATS message but did not independently bound the memory consumption of the memory stream when constructing a NATS message which might then fail validation for size reasons. An attacker can use a compression bomb to cause excessive memory consumption, often resulting in the operating system terminating the server process. The use of compression is negotiated before authentication, so this does not require valid NATS credentials to exploit. The fix, present in versions 2.11.2 and 2.12.3, was to bounds the decompression to fail once the message was too large, instead of continuing on. The vulnerability only affects deployments which use WebSockets and which expose the network port to untrusted end-points.
Title nats-server websockets are vulnerable to pre-auth memory DoS
Weaknesses CWE-409
CWE-770
References
Metrics cvssV3_1

{'score': 5.9, 'vector': 'CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H'}


Projects

Sign in to view the affected projects.

cve-icon MITRE

Status: PUBLISHED

Assigner: GitHub_M

Published:

Updated: 2026-02-24T15:59:17.926Z

Reserved: 2026-02-20T17:40:28.448Z

Link: CVE-2026-27571

cve-icon Vulnrichment

No data.

cve-icon NVD

Status : Awaiting Analysis

Published: 2026-02-24T17:29:03.393

Modified: 2026-02-24T21:52:01.367

Link: CVE-2026-27571

cve-icon Redhat

No data.

cve-icon OpenCVE Enrichment

No data.

Weaknesses